Communication endpoint users often have access to files that may be in a variety of formats. During a communication session with another communication endpoint, a user of one communication endpoint may wish to share a file or the contents of a file on or associated with that user's communication endpoint, with the user of the other communication endpoint or endpoints. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a mechanism by which the contents of files could be shared between endpoints between which a voice communication channel has been established.
As a particular example, communication application users, such as call center agents, are commonly employed to provide customer service and support. In a typical scenario, a communication application user is assigned to handle a call by an automatic call distribution system. Once the user is placed in voice communication with the customer, voice communications over the operative communication network or networks can begin. If either party to the call wishes to share content such as a text document, email message, or audio file, present solutions do not provide an integrated method for doing so.
Audio communication and conferencing solutions that support multimodal communications have been developed. In general, such solutions require specialized software be present at all endpoints. In addition, in order to share a file in support of voice communications between users at the different endpoints, existing multimodal audio conferencing solutions generally require that the file first be opened using an appropriate application by the party wishing to share the content of the file. The application must then be associated with the conferencing program. Accordingly, use of such systems is relatively complex and non-intuitive.